Win98 "trusty"???? What alternate universe are you living in?
Every time my Win98 SE installation crashes or freezes, I want to pour mo-gas in the PC case and burn the damn thing down to nickels. Then I remember it\'s the OS, not the hardware. I have Win2000 installed on another partition, and it runs rock steady. Why don\'t you scrap that Win98 and just switch to Win2K? XP is unproven as far as I\'m concerned.
I\'ve tried a couple of shell replacements similar to windowblinds, but they were highly unstable. I can\'t recommend that course.